INSIDE THE FAMILY DYNAMIC
 |
The Jones siblings — fron left, Jerry Jr., Charlotte and Stephen — laugh during the opening of Cowboys training camp this summer in Oxnard, Calif.
Photo by: AP IMAGES
|
JERRY JR.
“Family businesses bring positives and negatives. A huge positive is that you can get to a decision and get aligned real quick. You don’t worry so much about diplomacy. You just say this is not working and it’s got to go this way. That helps you be extremely efficient. The negative is, it is family. So how do you keep there from being sibling rivalry and how do you deal with that?”
JERRY
“If I had to list the No. 1 benefit, tangible or intangible, of having bought the Dallas Cowboys, it would be having worked … as a family together and built this thing. And other people notice that, too. They say your greatest accomplishment has been how you involved your children. And I really do agree.”
JERRY JR.
“There are no hidden agendas here. We’re just transparent and we love each other.”
CHARLOTTE
“The track record of the growth of our organization speaks to the fact that that model has worked. All of us respect that and I don’t anticipate it changing. Who at the end of the day evaluates all the opinions in the room and decides which way to go is, quite frankly, irrelevant in my mind. Once we leave that room, we’re united as one front in the direction that we’re going. So the process behind that door is simply that: The process behind the door.”
STEPHEN
“We could all sit back and let other people run the team. You could hire a CEO and a president and a chief marketing officer, and we could all go sit on boats and talk on the phone and go over financials and have board meetings every month. You could do that. But that’s not the way we’re built. We weren’t brought up that way. We were brought up to work. Charlotte works her ass off. Jerry works his ass off. I work my ass off. And we’re all doing it for a common cause.”
JERRY JR.
“Because we all did this together right out of school, we’re all very much aware of what the others have done to get us to this point. There’s a mutual respect across the board. That enables you to say, ‘What’s in a title?’ As a family, we are collectively making decisions. …
“Now, there is one twist there. We have a democracy with the veto of a dictatorship. We all know who has the final say.”
STEPHEN
“We’ve had some [disagreements] where we cleared out the damned meeting room. Everybody else says, ‘We’re out of here. We’re going to leave them to themselves.’ Everybody is sneaking out doors. Tables are getting slapped. ‘You feel that way?’ ‘I damned sure do.’ ‘Well, I feel just as strongly about where I am, too.’
“When anybody has an issue — doesn’t matter whether it’s one of our top executives, my brother, my sister, sometimes even my mother — it’s, ‘Stephen, you gotta talk to your dad.’”
JERRY
“Stephen always did his homework and he always had a read on whether I really had a strong opinion or I would change my mind. The facts are, he knew I would change my mind. He has seen me. I will have strong, strong feelings about the way to do something and then listen to a presentation, mildew on it, and come in and go with the other person’s idea. I’ve done it all my life.
“Smart people will tell you that you’ve got the opportunity not only to convince old Jerry, you’ve also got the opportunity to convince Stephen, and then he certainly can convince Jerry. Now, if those things don’t work, maybe in this case your idea isn’t so good and old Jerry would be right.”
